CHAPTER 3 2 THE OTHER GERMANY Der die Stefel looked down on me benignly as I drank my coffee and said, cHabe die Ehre!5 'Servus!' I answered blithely, wish- ing to put him at his ease. We had met before and liked each other immediately. He is a very good judge of affairs, with a good-humoured Viennese'contempt for the fretting anxieties of the midgets he sees coming to him in their nurses' arms to be christened and then in beflowered carriages to be confirmed and soon afterwards in a box to be buried. 'Ruhe, Kinder, nur Ruhy he says. 'You should take it all calmly, like I do.3 The Holy Roman Empire has gone but der die Stefel goes on for ever. When he was little his parents told him of the Romans, and their legions encamped just down the street, where the Hoher Markt now is, and he himself has seen the Turks and Napoleon, and now, when he sees the Nazis surging down the Karntnerstrasse and chanting in chorus *Ein Volk, ein Reich* ('One people, one State5), he looks across at his friend the Capu- ciner Church, where one hundred and forty-three Habsburg Emperors and Empresses and princes lie in stone coffins in the vault, among them the very son of that long-mouldered upstart Napoleon himself, and then he looks across at his other friend the Charles Church, which combines the dome of St Peter's in Rome and the portico of the Temple of Theseus in Athens and Trajan's column and a few other things, and oddly enough they all fit in, and he says, 'The little men are noisy again to-day, meine Herren Kollegen, I begin to fear that they never will learn5, and they answer, 'Ganz recht, Meister, ganz recht'. When I was in Paris the chanteuse used to sing lyrically of the joys of the stroll between la Madeleine et FOp&ra. She should have strolled with me from the Stefansplatz to the Opera. Here you are in the heart of Europe. Sooner or later everybody passes this way, and you sit on your caf6 terrace, or behind the steamy panes, and watch them — Mrs. Roosevelt, Wales- 235